The Age of Miracles Read online

“We don’t have cable, remember? I never even turn the TV on.”

  “What about the car radio?”

  “Broken,” she said.

  Even on ordinary days, Michaela had a continuous need for rides. On that first day of the slowing, while the rest of us watched the news in our living rooms, Michaela, stranded at the soccer field, fiddled for a while with an ancient, out-of-service pay phone, long forgotten by its maker—all the rest of us had cell phones—until finally the coach drove up to tell anyone who had shown up that the game was canceled, or at least postponed, and he gave Michaela a ride home.

  By noon on that first day, the networks had run out of new information. Drained of every fresh fact, they went right on reporting anyway, chewing and rechewing the same small chunks of news. It didn’t matter, we were mesmerized.

  I spent that whole day sitting on the carpet, only a few feet from the television with my parents. I still remember how it felt to live through those strange hours. It was almost physical: the need to know whatever there was to know.

  Periodically, my mother went around the house checking faucets one by one, inspecting the color and clarity of the water.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to the water, honey,” said my father. “It’s not an earthquake.”

  He held his glasses in his hands and was wiping the lenses with the bottom of his shirt, as if ours were a problem merely of vision. Bare of the glasses, his eyes always looked squinty to me, and too small.

  “You’re acting like this isn’t a big deal,” she said.

  This was a time when the disagreements between my parents were still minor.

  My father held his glasses up to the light, then carefully set them on his face. “Tell me what you want me to do, Helen,” he said. “And I’ll do it.”

  My father was a doctor. He believed in problems and solutions, diagnosis and cure. Worry, to his mind, was a waste.

  “People are panicking,” said my mother. “What about all the people who run the water systems and the power grid? What about the food supply? What if they abandon their posts?”

  “All we can do is ride this thing out,” he said.

  “Oh, that’s a good plan,” she said. “That’s a really excellent plan.”

  I watched her hurry out to the kitchen, her bare feet slapping the tile. I heard the click and creak of the liquor cabinet, the clinking of ice in a glass.

  “I bet things will turn out okay,” I said, gripped by an urge to say some cheerful thing—it rose up from my throat like a cough. “I bet it will be fine.”

  Already the crackpots and the geniuses were streaming out of the wilderness and appearing on talk shows, waving the scientific papers that the established journals had declined to publish. These lone wolves claimed to have seen the disaster coming.

  My mother returned to the couch with a drink in her hand.

  At the bottom of the television screen, a question blared in red block letters. This was the question: is the end near?

  “Oh, come on,” said my father. “That’s just pure sensationalism. What are they saying on public television?” The question dissolved in the air. No one changed the channel. Then he looked over at me and said to my mother, “I don’t think she should be watching this. Julia,” he said, “you want to go kick the ball around?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. I didn’t want to be outside. I didn’t want to miss a single piece of news.

  I had pulled my sweatshirt down over my knees. Tony lay beside me on the rug, his paws outstretched, his breathing wheezy. His body was so bony, you could see the knobs in his spine. Chloe was hiding under the couch.

  “Come on,” said my father. “Let’s go kick the ball around for a while.” He dug my soccer ball out of the hall closet and pressed it between his hands. “It feels a little low,” he said.

  I watched him handle the pump as if it were a piece of his medical equipment, inserting the needle into the opening with a surgeon’s precision and care, then pumping methodically, like a respirator, always waiting for the last gasp of air to pass into the ball before forcing the next one through.

  I tied my shoes reluctantly and we went outside.

  We kicked back and forth in silence for a while. I could hear the newscasters chattering inside. Their voices mingled with the clean thud of foot against ball.

  The neighboring backyards were deserted. Swing sets stood still as ruins. The twins’ trampoline had ceased to squeak. I wanted to be back inside.

  “That was a nice one,” said my father. “Good accuracy.”

  But he didn’t know much about soccer. He kicked with the wrong part of the foot. I hit the next one too hard, and the ball disappeared into the honeysuckle in the corner of our yard. We stopped kicking then.

  “You’re okay, right?” he said.

  Large birds had begun to circle the sky. These were not suburban birds. These were hawks and eagles and crows, birds whose hefty wings spoke of the wilder landscapes that persisted east of here. They swooped from tree to tree, their calls drowning out the twitter of our usual backyard birds.

  I knew that animals often sensed danger where humans did not, and that in the minutes or hours before a tsunami or a wildfire strikes, the animals always know to flee long before the people do. I had heard that elephants sometimes snapped their chains and headed for higher ground. Snakes could slither for miles.

  “Do you think the birds know?” I asked. I could feel the muscles in my neck tensing as I watched them.

  My father studied their shapes but said nothing. A hawk landed at the crown of our pine tree, flapped his wings, then took off again, heading farther west toward the coast.

  From inside, my mother called to us through the screen door, “Now they’re saying it might be affecting gravity somehow.”

  “We’ll be there in a minute,” said my father. He squeezed my shoulder hard, then tilted his head up to the sky like a farmer on the lookout for rain. “I want you to think how smart humans are,” he said. “Think of everything humans have ever invented. Rocket ships, computers, artificial hearts. We solve problems, you know? We always solve the big problems. We do.”

  We walked inside after that, through the French doors and onto the tile, my father insisting that we wipe our feet on the doormat as we crossed—as if remembering our rituals could ensure our safe passage—back to the living room to my mother. But I felt as he spoke and as we walked that although the world remained intact for now, everything around me was about to come apart.

  In the hours that followed, we would worry and wait. We would guess and wonder and speculate. We would learn new words and new ways from the scientists and officials who paraded in and out of our living room through the television screen and the Internet. We would stalk the sun across our sky as we never had before. My mother drank Scotch over ice in a glass. My father paced. Time moved differently that Saturday. Already the morning felt like yesterday. By the time we sat waiting for the sun to drift down behind the hills to the west, it seemed to me that several days had passed inside the skin of just this one, as if the day had ballooned by much more than a single small hour.

  In the late afternoon, my father climbed the stairs to my parents’ bedroom and then reappeared transformed in a collared shirt and dark socks. A pair of dress shoes was swinging from two of his fingers.

  “Are you going somewhere?” asked my mother.

  “I’m on at six, remember?”

  My father delivered babies for a living, and he specialized in high-risk births. He was often on call, and he sometimes worked the overnight shift at the hospital. He frequently worked weekends.

  “Don’t go,” said my mother. “Not tonight.”

  I remember hoping she could convince him not to go, but he continued to tie his shoes. He liked the loops in his bows to be exactly the same size.

  “They’ll understand if you don’t show up,” said my mother. “It’s chaos out there, with the traffic and the panic and everything.”

  Some of my f
ather’s patients had spent months in the hospital, trying to hold their babies in their wombs until the babies were strong enough to survive the world.

  “Come on, Helen,” he said. “You know I can’t stay.”

  He stood up and patted his front pocket. I heard the muted jingle of keys.

  “We need you here,” my mother said. She rested her head sideways against my father’s chest—he was over a foot taller. “We really don’t want you to go, right, Julia?”

  I wanted him to stay, too, but I’d grown expert at diplomacy as only an only child can.

  “I wish he didn’t have to go,” I said carefully. “But I guess if he has to go.”

  My mother turned away from me and said to him more softly, “Please. We don’t even know what’s happening.”

  “Come on, Helen,” he said, smoothing her hair. “Don’t be so dramatic. Nothing’s going to happen between now and tomorrow morning. I’m betting this whole thing will blow over.”

  “How?” she said. “How could it?”

  He kissed her on the cheek and waved to me from the entry hall. Then he stepped outside and shut the door. Soon we heard his car starting up in the driveway.

  My mother flopped down next to me on the couch. “At least you’re not abandoning me,” she said. “We’ll have to take care of each other.”

  I felt like escaping to Hanna’s house right then, but I knew it would upset my mother if I left.

  From outside, the voices of children floated into the living room. Through the blinds, I could see the Kaplan family walking down the sidewalk. Saturday was their Sabbath day, which meant they didn’t drive all day. There were six of them now: Mr. and Mrs. Kaplan, Jacob, Beth, Aaron, and the baby in the stroller. The kids went to the Jewish day school up north, and they dressed mostly in black, in a way that reminded me of characters in old movies, a flutter of long skirts and black pants. Beth Kaplan was my age, but I didn’t know her well. She kept to herself. She wore a long-sleeve shirt and a long rectangular black skirt with stylish red patent-leather shoes. I figured that footwear was her one place to shine. As the Kaplans glided past our house, the littlest one picking dandelions from the edge of our lawn, I realized that they might not yet know about the slowing.

  I found out much later from Jacob that I was right: The Kaplans did not discover until sundown—when their Sabbath was over and their religion once again allowed them to flip light switches and watch TV—that this world was any different from the one they’d been born into. If you didn’t hear the news, the landscape looked unchanged. This was not true later, of course, but for now, on this first day, the earth still seemed itself.

  We lived on a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood of tract houses built in the 1970s on quarter-acre lots with stucco exteriors and asbestos in the ceilings and the walls. An olive tree twisted up from every front yard unless it had been torn out and replaced with some trendier, thirstier tree. The yards on our street were well kept but not obsessively so. Daisies and dandelions were scattered amid the thinning grass. Pink bougainvillea bushes clung to the sides of almost all the houses, shaking and shimmering in the wind.

  In satellite maps from that era, our row of cul-de-sacs looks neat and parallel, each with a fat bulb at the end, like ten thermometers hanging from a string. Ours was one in a web of modest streets carved into the less expensive side of a coastal California hill whose pricier slope faced the ocean.

  Our mornings were bright back then. Our kitchens faced east. Sun streamed through windows as coffeepots gurgled and showers ran, as I brushed my teeth or chose an outfit for school. Our afternoons were shady and cool because each evening, the sun dropped behind the nicer houses at the top of the hill a full hour before it slipped into the ocean on the other side. On this day, we waited for sunset with new suspense.

  “I think it moved a little,” I said, squinting. “I mean, it’s definitely going down.”

  All along the street, garage doors eased open on electric tracks. Station wagons and SUVs emerged, loaded with kids and clothes and dogs. A few neighbors stood clustered, arms crossed, on their lawns. Everyone was watching the sky as if waiting for a fireworks show to begin.

  “Don’t look directly at the sun,” said my mother, who was sitting beside me on the porch. “It’ll ruin your eyes.”

  She was peeling open a package of double-A batteries she’d found in a drawer. Three flashlights lay on the cement beside her, a mini arsenal of light. The sun remained high in the sky, but she had grown obsessed already with the possibilities of an extra-long night.

  In the distance at the end of the street, I spotted my old friend Gabby, sitting alone on her roof. I hadn’t seen her much since her parents had transferred her to a private school in the next town over from ours. As usual, she was dressed in all black. Her dyed black hair stood out against the sky.

  “Why did she dye it like that?” said my mother.

  “I don’t know,” I said. Not visible from this distance were the three tiers of earrings that hung from both of Gabby’s ears. “She just felt like it, I guess.”

  A portable radio chattered and buzzed beside us. We were gaining more minutes with every hour. Already, they were arguing about the wheat point—I’ve never understood if this was a term that had been buried for decades in the glossaries of textbooks, or if it was coined on that day, a new answer to a new question: How long can major crops survive without the light of the sun?

  My mother switched the flashlights on and off, one by one, testing their beams in the cup of her hand. She dumped the old batteries out of each barrel and replaced them with new ones, as if arranging ammunition in a set of guns.

  “I don’t know why your father hasn’t called me back,” she said.

  She’d brought the cordless phone out to the porch, where it sat silent beside her. She took quick soundless sips of her drink. I remember her the way she was then, the sound of the ice clinking in the glass, the way the water dripped down the sides, leaving intersecting rings on the cement.

  Not everyone panicked. Sylvia, my piano teacher, who lived across the street, went right on tending her garden as if nothing at all had happened. I watched her kneeling calmly in the dirt, a pair of shiny shears in one hand. Later, she took a slow walk around the block, her clogs tapping the sidewalk as she went, her red hair falling from a hasty braid.

  “Hi, Julia,” she said when she reached our yard. She smiled at my mother but did not say her name. They were about the same age, but Sylvia still seemed girlish somehow, and my mother did not.

  “You don’t seem very worried,” said my mother.

  “Que será, será,” said Sylvia. Her words were one long sigh. “That’s what I always say. Whatever will be, will be.”

  I liked Sylvia, but I knew my mother didn’t. Sylvia was cool and wispy and she smelled like lotion. Her limbs were lanky, like the branches of eucalyptus trees, and were often encircled in chunky turquoise jewelry, which she removed at the beginning of each of my piano lessons in order to commune more closely with the keys. She always played piano barefoot.

  “Or maybe I’m just not thinking straight,” Sylvia said. “I’m in the middle of doing a cleanse.”

  “What’s a cleanse?” I said.

  “It’s a fast,” said Sylvia.

  She bent toward me to explain, and I heard my mother slide her flashlights behind her back. I think she was suddenly embarrassed by her fear.

  “No food, no alcohol, just water. For three days. I’m sure your mother has done one before.”

  My mother shook her head. “Not me,” she said. I was aware of my mother’s drink, sweating on the pavement beside her. For a moment nothing else was said.

  “Anyway,” said Sylvia, beginning to walk away, “don’t let this stop you from practicing, Julia. See you Wednesday.”

  Sylvia would spend the next few afternoons pruning roses in a sun hat and casually pulling up weeds.

  “You know, it’s not healthy to be that skinny,” said my mother after Sylvia h
ad gone back to her gardening. (My mother kept a closet full of dresses one size too small, all waiting in plastic, for the day when she lost the ten pounds she’d been complaining about for years.) “You can see her bones,” said my mother. And it was true: You could.

  “Look,” I said. “The streetlights came on.”

  Those lights were set to a timer, designed to ignite at dusk. But the sun continued to shine.

  I imagined people on the other side of the world, in China and in India, huddling now in the darkness, waiting, like us—but for dawn.

  “He should let us know he got to work safely, at least,” said my mother. She dialed again, waited, set the phone down.

  I’d gone with my father to work once. Not much had happened while I was there. Pregnant women watched television and ate snacks in bed. My father asked questions and checked charts. Husbands milled around.

  “Didn’t I ask him to call?” she said.

  She was making me nervous. I tried to keep her calm.

  “He’s probably just busy,” I said.

  In the distance, I noticed that Tom and Carlotta, the old couple who lived at the end of the street, were sitting outside, too, he in a faded tie-dyed T-shirt and jeans, she in Birkenstocks, a long gray braid resting on her shoulder. But they were always out there at this time of night, beach chairs in the driveway, margaritas and cigarettes in their hands. Their garage door stood open behind them, Tom’s model train tracks exposed like guts. Most of the houses on our street had been remodeled by then, or fixed up, at least, given fresh veneers like old teeth, but Tom and Carlotta’s house remained untouched, and I knew from selling Girl Scout cookies that the original burgundy shag still lined their floors.

  Tom waved at me, his hand thick with a drink. I didn’t know him well, but he was always friendly to me. I waved back.

  It was October, but it felt like July: The air was summer air, the sky a summer sky, still light past seven o’clock.

  “I hope the phones are working,” said my mother. “But they must be working, right?”

  In the time since that night, I’ve developed many of my mother’s habits, the persistent churning of her mind on a single subject, her low tolerance for uncertainty, but like her wide hips and her high cheekbones, these were traits that would sleep dormant in me for some years to come. That night I could not relate to her.